Chapter 1: Concepts and definitions

Goals

Understand conceptual and operational definitions

Know some strategies for clarifying conceptual definitions and writing concept definitions

Defining terms

Research Questions

  • Does religion play a role in civil wars?

  • What causes increasing income inequality in least developed countries?

  • Why has public opinion on same sex marriage liberalized so rapidly?

  • Is the U.S. becoming more polarized?

Not everyone is going to agree on what these terms mean!

Before we can get anywhere researching these questions, we need to define the thing we’re studying

Defining things: harder than it seems!

Reasonable definition of a chair

Chair

Terms

Conceptual Definition

A description of the concrete, measurable properties of a concept and the unit of analysis to which it applies

Unit of Analysis

The entity that that is being studied. For instance: individuals, governments, parties etc.

Operational Definition

A description of the instrument used to measure the concept

Crafting Conceptual Definitions: Unit of Analysis

  • What is the unit? What entity possesses the characteristic?

    • The U.S. and Canada are democracies (concept: democracy, unit: countries)

    • Lincoln, LBJ, and Trump are the three tallest U.S. presidents (concept: height, unit: presidents/people)

    • Labour is the UK’s main center-left political party (concept: party ideology/family, unit: political party)

Crafting Conceptual Definitions: Key features

  • What are the essential features?

    • If there are cases or definitions everyone agrees on, what features do they share?

    • Are certain characteristics necessary or sufficient to qualify?

    • What characteristics are most distinctive to those cases?

    • What might change to move cases from one category to another? What is most helpful for clarifying edge-cases?

    • Are there multiple dimensions or just one? If two characteristics always occur together, you might only need to account for one of them!

Crafting Conceptual Definitions: transparency

Are the features measurable and transparent? It may be impossible to reach consensus definitions, but at a minimum we should be able to understand what the other person means when they use a concept.

(example of a less-than-ideal conceptual definition of obscenity)

Steps

  • Identify the unit of analysis

  • Make a list of important properties, clear examples and non-examples, and/or generally accepted definitions

  • Eliminate characteristics that aren’t distinctive.

  • Remove items that aren’t measureable

  • Reduce dimensions where possible

  • Refine as needed

Defining Terrorism

Defining Terrorism

Operational Definitions

Operationalization

Even where we agree on a definition, we will need to measure a concept and there is often slippage here

Consider measuring party identification:

Instrument Problem
Registration Excludes new/non-voters, people in states without partisan registration, and people who register one way and vote another
Policy views Complicated to measure, and a surprising number of people don’t have consistent policy views!
Voting Behavior Excludes new/non-voters, may not be consistent even in a single election, people may exaggerate or forget voting behavior.
Self Description* Subjective, far more self-described “independents” than people who consistently vote that way

Operationalization

Considerations: Parsimony

In many cases, we trade some truth for simplicity

This is a very accurate rendering of the DC metro area

But this is probably more useful for getting around.

Considerations: Parsimony

Similarly: we might consider “democracy” to be a highly complex multidimensional concept

mindmap
  root((Democracy))
    Liberal Rights
        Free Speech
        Free Association
        Rule of law
    Deliberation
        Respectful Dialogue
        Adversarial Press
        Broad Participation
    Egalitarianism
        Equal Rights
        Equitable access to resources
        Diverse representation
    Majoritarianism
        Fair elections
        Peaceful transfer of power
        Meaningful alternatives

Considerations: Parsimony

…but we might still prefer an operational definition that relies on a subset of concepts that are easy to measure.

mindmap
  root((Democracy))
    Majoritarianism
        Fair elections
        Peaceful transfer of power
        Meaningful alternatives

Considerations: Validity

Considerations: Reliability

Measurement Error

  • Systematic

  • Random

Random Measurement Error

Systematic Measurement Error